Lovers XXX

Praise for Lovers XXX

“Rowbottom’s portrayal of the porn demimonde is exciting and gritty without feeling lurid, and the novel doubles as a moving ode to the value of a female friendship. It’s a knockout.”
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

“A glamorous, sun-drenched Los Angeles epic set in the early ‘80s, during the so-called Golden Age of pornography . . . Raw and moving, [Lovers XXX] explores the intimate and complex friendship between two adult film starlets as they navigate sex, drugs, and life on the neon-lit margins.”
—Playboy

“Lovers XXX is Persona set in the ’80s porn world—thrillingly literary; thrillingly sleazy.”
—Lili Anolik, author of Didion and Babitz

“Lovers XXX tackles the sticky subjects of female sexuality, objectification and desire with a smoothness that appears effortless. Allie Rowbottom’s writing has a rare combination of deep compassion, prescient insight, and just plain coolness that I’m in awe of.”
—Coco Mellors, author of Blue Sisters

“You’re thrown right into Lovers XXX and it doesn’t stop. Allie writes about desire, survival, intimacy, and exploitation with a kind of feral tenderness. She turns stick-ups, strip clubs, and motel rooms into a fever dream that makes ruin look romantic. Impossible to put down!”
—Madeline Cash, author of Lost Lambs

“Allie Rowbottom’s Lovers XXX is a fever dream and love song—an ode to the gritty places we find solace and sustenance and glimpses of sublimity. Pulsing and propulsive, it’s about the way it feels to wake up in the morning next to your best friend, and the ache of reading her diary and finding a stranger there. It’s a ballad in the old sense, with guns and betrayal and wounds carried across decades, but its heart belongs to its women . . . This book is bold and bleeding at once, just like its characters, drawing on old genres—the Western, the ballad, the sleepover secret, the dirty flick, the apology, the torch song—to invent something utterly new and beautifully haunted.”
—Leslie Jamison, author of The Gin Closet

“Smart, sad, sexy, and at times surprisingly sweet, Allie Rowbottom’s Lovers XXX does for the stars of adult filmmaking what her previous novel Aesthetica did for cosmetically enhanced influencers: It casts a humanising spell, transforming the women at its centre from mere naked flesh into something more like real flesh and blood. Beneath all that silicone and slickness, Rowbottom locates a warm, beating heart.”
—Philippa Snow, author of It’s Terrible the Things I Have to Do to Be Me